Software Engineer - API Designer

About the Team

Our team brings OpenAI’s most capable technology to the world through our developer platform: the OpenAI API. As the leading AI development platform, our API is used by millions of developers and the majority of enterprises around the world, and powers the majority of AI applications that you may use on a daily basis. Most recently, we’ve released o1, gpt-4o, the realtime API, structured outputs, distillation, prompt caching, and many other products and features.

About the Role

We are looking for a software engineer to own the design of our APIs. Our API is our product, and as such we treat its design and development with care and intentionality. Every endpoint, every field name, and every enum value is a product interface that we want to design well. We are looking for engineers who not only love building APIs, but who will also sweat the details around API design and have a discerning taste for well designed API experience. You will play a major role in shaping the future roadmap of the OpenAI API – by both building and designing it.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build products that we launch in API – extending existing endpoints, adding new endpoints, or rethinking our entire API suite.

• Play a major role in our API Review process – working with all other teams to ensure our APIs meet our design standard.

• Collaborate closely with the rest of the API team, our Developer Experience team, and our GTM team to make our APIs the best in the world.

You might thrive in this role if you: 

• Appreciate taste in API design – you believe there are well designed APIs and poorly designed APIs

• Can thrive and operate independently in a fast-paced environment with ambiguous requirements and goals

• Love building for other developers, and thrive on feedback from opinionated users

• Are an engineer at heart, but are willing to lean into product decisions.

• Think of APIs as ladders.